Paying off Credit Card Debt

Today I figured up the DLOP (Dead On Last Payment) method for my credit cards and medical bills.

There are many methods that you can use to choose which order to pay off debts but in short what you do is you list all of your accounts and their balances. For the DLOP method you take the outstanding balance and divide that by the minimum payment due each month and then you will come up with a number - the DLOP number, if you will. Then you would rank each account lowest to highest DLOP number. The account with the lowest DLOP you would pay off first and then the second lowest DLOP number is paid next.

Other similar methods of paying off debt are sometimes referred to as the snowball method and are a little less mentally complicated. Here you would just list all of your accounts and then either choose:
highest interest
highest balance
lowest interest
lowest balance
And rank your accounts accordingly in order to pay them off.

Ok, so - we have come up with our ranking: now what?
Each debt you continue to pay the minimum balance due with the exception of one. The one that you picked (ranked 1) you will send in the minimum balance due plus any extra that you can send. For myself, the priority account gets NO LESS than minimum due + 20.00. (Keep in mind I am a single 24 yr old female living on her own with no financial support but my own wages.) If I happened to have a good paycheck then of course I would send in more, as much as I could. The purpose of me saying the Minimum+20 is because I know that push come to shove I can find $20 extra somewhere but I couldn't exactly always find $100 extra.

http://www.oprah.com/article/money/debtdiet_steps_03/1
Oprah is awesome - no matter what your opinion about her is. Here is a four page explanation of credit cards. There is even a script for you to help negotiate with the credit card company for a lower interest rate (which I'll prob talk about in a later post) and at the end of it is a DLOP worksheet helping to further show what I have explained above about DLOP